JOHN PIELMEIER
John Pielmeier began his career as an actor, working at Actors Theater of Louisville, The Guthrie Theater, Milwaukee Rep, Alaska Rep, Baltimore's Center Stage, and the O'Neill National Playwrights' Conference. It was at the O'Neill that his play AGNES OF GOD was first staged. A co-winner of the 1979 Great American Play Contest, AGNES premiered professionally in March 1980 at Actors Theater of Louisville, followed by several regional productions and a seventeen-month run on Broadway.
His other plays include COURAGE, a one-man show about J M Barrie that premiered in Louisville, opened the new theater at the Lambs' Club in New York City, and has been filmed by Kentucky Educational Television; JASS, presented at the O'Neill Playwrights Conference; YOUNG RUBE, a musical comedy (with music and lyrics by Matthew Selman) based on the formative years of cartoonist/inventor Rube Goldberg, which premiered at The Repertory Theater of St Louis; and WILLI, a one-man show based on the speeches of mountaineer Willi Unsoeld, presented (and performed by the author) at A Contemporary Theater in Seattle to great critical acclaim where it broke box office records.
For Choices of the Heart, a television movie he wrote about the slain American missionaries in El Salvador, he received a Christopher Award, the Humanitas Award, a Writers Guild of America nomination, and an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from St Edward's University in Austin, Texas. He has written several movies for television, as well as the screenplay for the film
Agnes of God (Writers Guild nomination).
He is a member of The Dramatists' Guild, The Writers' Guild of America East, and an alumni member of New Dramatists. He is a past recipient of an N E A grant and a Shubert fellowship, and has received Alumni Achievement honors for both his Alma Maters.
He is blissfully married to poet/author/book-maker Irene O'Garden and resides in Garrison, New York.